Why is the Biden administration funding a UN agency it deems ‘unacceptable’?
Eitan Fischberger
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In the diplomatic understatement of the year, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides stated last month that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, the U.N. body tasked with helping so-called Palestinian refugees, “has serious flaws.” Then, during a March 1 hearing on Capitol Hill, Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield asserted that the proven misuse of UNRWA facilities for terroristic purposes “is absolutely unacceptable.”
Yet despite these “unacceptable” facts, the Biden administration has funded UNRWA to the tune of nearly $700 million since the president took office.
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Far more than mere flaws, UNRWA is rotten to the core and has been since it was established in 1949. For this reason, a pair of congressional bills called the “UNRWA Accountability and Transparency Act” was introduced in February to strip UNRWA of its funding from the United States government until it undergoes a systemic overhaul to address its failings.
The failings are well documented. For starters, various nonprofit groups, national governments, and intergovernmental bodies have sounded the alarm about the content of UNRWA’s textbooks, which glorify Palestinian terrorism and portray Jews as “treacherous” and “impure” and describe the establishment of the state of Israel as a “major racist calamity.”
Relatedly, the watchdog group U.N. Watch revealed in 2021 that over 120 UNRWA educators posted antisemitic and pro-terrorist posts on their social media accounts, including praises of Adolf Hitler and theories about Jews controlling the world.
According to its own website, UNRWA operates 96 schools in the West Bank and East Jerusalem where, over the last month, several terrorist attacks against Israelis were perpetrated by Palestinians as young as 13. Even if potential teenage attackers are not themselves enrolled in one of UNRWA’s many schools, surely they have friends who are. And if their friends repeat what they learn in school and hear from teachers, as children so often do, is it that far-fetched to think that some would take the incitements that these schools teach to their logical, violent conclusion?
Moreover, in a little-known piece of trivia, UNRWA actually has a Gaza-based workers union dominated in large part by Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, two U.S.-designated terrorist organizations with American blood on their hands. Put simply, American taxpayer dollars may be lining the pockets of America’s enemies.
Last but not least, the State Department admitted that Palestinian terrorists use UNRWA facilities as weapons caches and cover for underground terror tunnels, effectively using them and the innocent people who live around them as human shields.
These myriad cases of abuse are enabled by the limited U.S. oversight of how UNRWA utilizes its grants. This arguably runs counter to section 301(c) of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act, which aims to prevent U.S. contributions to UNRWA from being exploited for terror-related purposes.
The problems with UNRWA do not solely concern the content of its antisemitic personnel and its ties to terrorism but run on a deeper, more systemic level. The most egregious example of this is that UNRWA defines Palestinians as refugees from birth, regardless of whether they hold citizenship elsewhere, and that status is passed on to their descendants automatically and in perpetuity.
This framing is intentional, ensuring that the supposed Palestinian refugee crisis will never be solved. It also differs from how the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, which deals with all other refugees and displaced people on the planet, defines a refugee.
Speaking of the UNHCR, the agency employs about 11,000 staffers to help the world’s roughly 80 million refugees, asylum-seekers, and displaced people. Conversely, UNRWA has triple that amount on its payroll to deal with just 5.8 million Palestinians. Interestingly, the Obama administration reportedly determined that the actual number of Palestinian refugees, according to the UNHCR definition, is likely around 30,000.
These and other troubling facts led the Trump administration to defund UNRWA in 2018. For some inexplicable reason, this move was reversed by President Joe Biden in 2021 despite USAID’s inability to verify that its grants were not being diverted to terrorists.
Biden’s misguided empowering of UNRWA is a strategic error that accomplishes the opposite of its intended effect at the expense of the public. Instead, the president should focus his efforts on demanding fundamental reforms from UNRWA, starting with signing the UNRWA Accountability and Transparency Act into law if and when it passes Congress.
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Eitan Fischberger is an international relations and Middle East analyst based in Israel. His work has been published in National Review, NBC News THINK, and more. Tweet him @EFischberger.